Rebecca Gleit

Rebecca is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. In her research, she uses both in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and quantitative methods to study how social institutions shape life course trajectories for emerging adults. Her current research examines how inter-institutional processes – specifically, the connections between schools and criminal-legal institutions – shape young people’s lives. In another line of work, I practice public sociology: I study intra-institutional processes within higher education to develop pedagogy that promotes students’ flourishing within my own classroom.

I hold a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.Ed. in Educational Policy and Leadership. Before arriving at Stanford, I taught high school math in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While at Stanford, I have been a Graduate Teaching Fellow at CCSRE, an Institute for Education Sciences (IES) fellow through the Stanford Center for Education Policy and Analysis (CEPA), and a Graduate Teaching Consultant with the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning.

Efforts to reform school discipline are popular, yet unequal outcomes by race and class remain. In my dissertation – a multi-year school-based ethnography – I seek to understand the mechanisms that sustain such disparities, despite institutions’ attempt to mitigate it. Institutional attempts to mitigate inequality often involve the provision of additional resources for students and families. My work reveals processes through which schools’ increasingly central role as a resource broker can also maintain inequality.